Frontline Pakistan : The Struggle With Militant Islam - Arz-e-Pak
Frontline Pakistan : The Struggle With Militant Islam - Arz-e-Pak
Frontline Pakistan : The Struggle With Militant Islam - Arz-e-Pak
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1 <strong>Frontline</strong> <strong><strong>Pak</strong>istan</strong><br />
<strong>The</strong> capture of Ghailani and Naeem caused a huge dent in al-<br />
Qaeda’s network, but the group had shown its great capacity to<br />
organize into new cells. It was difficult to completely dismantle the<br />
loosely connected and highly mobile groups and it took almost ten<br />
months for <strong><strong>Pak</strong>istan</strong>i security forces to capture another key al-Qaeda<br />
operative. Abu Faraj al-Libbi, a Libyan national, had been working as<br />
the head of al-Qaeda’s external operations after the capture of KSM,<br />
and was the key link with the <strong><strong>Pak</strong>istan</strong>i militants. Al-Libbi’s name came<br />
to the surface after he was identified as the mastermind behind the<br />
failed assassination attempts on Musharraf in December 2003. He had<br />
been on the list of the six ‘most wanted’ men in a <strong><strong>Pak</strong>istan</strong>i poster<br />
campaign for his involvement in a series of terrorist actions. 55<br />
Al-Libbi was captured in a dramatic raid, while he was being<br />
driven on a motorbike in Mardan, a town in the North West Frontier<br />
Province. Intelligence agents tracked down this most wanted fugitive<br />
after arresting a messenger. After the series of arrests of high-profile<br />
operatives a year earlier, al-Qaeda had to minimize the use of<br />
electronic communications and largely relied on manual messaging.<br />
However, that also made them more vulnerable. Al-Libbi and Rabia<br />
had taken over al-Qaeda’s operations after Ghailani’s capture. Al-<br />
Libbi’s arrest led to some startling revelations about his contacts across<br />
eight countries. <strong>The</strong> al-Qaeda hierarchy had always been fluid and<br />
complex, so speculation about al-Libbi being the third in command<br />
in the organization is hard to confirm, but he was certainly a very<br />
important man in the global terrorist network. He was a major facilitator<br />
and chief planner for al-Qaeda. 56 It is, however, not clear whether al-<br />
Libbi and Rabia were in direct contact with bin Laden or al-Zawahiri,<br />
who were still believed to be operating from the mountainous border<br />
between <strong><strong>Pak</strong>istan</strong> and Afghanistan.<br />
Rabia was killed in December 2005 by a missile fired by a US<br />
predator aircraft on his hideout in a village in North Waziristan. 57 He<br />
had figured on the CIA’s wanted list with a bounty of $5 million for his<br />
capture. Rabia had inherited the job of chief of al-Qaeda’s operations in<br />
<strong><strong>Pak</strong>istan</strong>, after al-Libbi’s arrest. Reputed to be one of the organization’s<br />
top five officials, he oversaw relations with international al-Qaeda<br />
cells and other foreign terrorist groups. In al-Qaeda’s structure, the<br />
operational commander was the most active of all senior leaders. 58 In<br />
his late thirties, Rabia was reportedly sent to Iraq after the American<br />
invasion in 2003, but was deemed too valuable to al-Qaeda central<br />
command in Afghanistan.